HTML Forum

WebMonkey has an article [hotwired.lycos.com] about the "Death of the Websafe Color Palette"

Browser bugs that render "bgcolor" differently from GIF indexed color have eaten away 4 previously safe colors. But the big deal is that, outside of black and white, 16-bit color does not exactly share any colors at all with either 8-bit color or 24-bit color.

They come up with 22 REALLY web-safe colors at present, and no easy answers!

I've realized for a while that the majority of people are running 16 bit color right now, but most designers (including me) usually work in 24 bit color. SOmetimes it's no biggie, but depending on the art, it can be very disconcerting to switch over to 16-bit and see what over 50% are seeing.

I've been working on a site where the art department is very fond of gradients and matching colors in images to bgcolor. In 16 bit, the site looks like a grade school project!

Of course, designing in 16-bit color can throw a real zinger at the other 40%. This includes the people who recently shelled out the bucks for updated equipment (and that is often the people who hire me!)

I want to bring back this topic in relation to higher screen resolution settings.

This color issue is a big, largely unexamined pandora's box, as I see it. As this topic started out discussing, the "web safe" pallette isn't all that safe. And yet, clients can be looking for a very sophisticated appearance on their site -- the full 24 bit color palette.

As bigger screen resolutions come onto the market, are we looking at a continuation of 16 bit color as the de facto standard for years into the future? My card won't support 24 bit color beyond the 1024x768 setting. Is this a common cutoff, or are most people able to get 24 bit color at 1200 or even 1600 res?

When they wade into the tangled world wide web, designers from a print backsground have a big frustration with color. In the print world, they had to adapt to the specific press they were using for final output, but at least there was only one press. This is like trying to makeready a single file for 20 different printers!

I made what I now consider a mistake when I bought my current monitor -- I sprang for a relatively big-bucks graphics design monitor. For web-work, I now think that a consumer level, nearly generic, monitor is the better choice -- and it costs less!